Zach Archer: Live Coding 500 Watts For ToorCamp

February 28, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 2 Comments

ToorCamp is a five-day open air tech camping event held every two years somewhere around the northwest corner of Washington state. Think of it as something like Burning Man, except you can survive for three hours without water, there aren’t a whole bunch of scenesters and Instagram celebs flying in on private planes, and everyone there can actually build something. Oh, and ToorCamp has delivery drones that will send you creme brulee. These mini creme brulees were probably made with the hot air gun hanging off a soldering station. Don’t worry, you’re getting fresh air that’ll balance out the heavy metal poisoning.

For last year’s ToorCamp, the biggest welcome sign was a 40-foot-long illuminated ToorCamp sign. This was designed, built and coded by Zach Archer, and he was at the 2018 Hackaday Superconference to give us the details on how he made it and how it was coded.

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KiCon Gets Our KiCad Conference On

February 27, 2019 by Kerry Scharfglass 11 Comments

Oh, what’s KiCon you say? KiCon is the first dedicated conference on our favorite libre EDA tool: KiCad, organized by friend of Hackaday Chris Gammell and scheduled for April 26 and 27th in Chicago.

Having stuffed ourselves full of treats through the holidays, followed by sleeping through the calm winter months, we find ourselves once again facing the overwhelming tsunami of conference season. This year things are heating up early, and you’ll find a lot of Hackaday staff are headed to Chicago for KiCon.

Now that early selection of talks has been released, the end of April can’t come soon enough. Being user focused the conference is centered around what people make using the tool, and how it can be leveraged to improve your next project. Wayne Stambaugh, the project lead for KiCad itself, will be on hand to talk about the state of the tool and what the road map looks like from here. There will be a pair of talks on effective version control and applying the practice of continuous integration and deployment to the EDA world. We’ll hear about methods for working with distributed project members and tips for designing easy to learn beginner soldering kits. And there will be two talks on RF and microwave design, one of which we hope will teach us how to use that mysterious toolbar with the squiggly lines.

For an extra dash of flavor there will be a few Hackaday staff participating in the festivities. Anool Mahidharia is making the flight over to present a talk about how to quickly generate and use 3D models in FreeCAD, something we’re very interested in applying to our messy part libraries. Kerry Scharfglass will be around to walk through how to lay out a manufacturing line and design the test tools that sit on it. And our illustrious Editor in Chief Mike Szczys will be roaming the halls in search of excellent hacks to explore and brains to pick.

Interested in attending or volunteering for the conference? Now is the time to buy your tickets and/or apply as a volunteer!

Of course there’s a ton of fun and games that surround KiCon. Hackaday will be hosting another edition of our always exciting bring-a-hack the evening of Saturday April 27th after official activities wrap up. Plan to stop by and enjoy a beverage at this gathering of like minded hackers who are showing off awesome toys. We’ll get more location details out soon, but for now, grab a ticket to the con and make your travel arrangements.

Hands-on: Hacker Hotel 2019 Badge Packs ESP32, E-Ink, And A Shared Heritage

February 26, 2019 by Jenny List 6 Comments

When you go to a hacker conference, you always hope there’s going to be a hardware badge. This is an interactive piece of custom electronics that gets you in the door while also delighting and entertaining during the con (and hopefully far beyond it).

Hot off the presses then is the Hacker Hotel badge, from the comfortable weekend hacker camp of that name in a Netherlands hotel. As we have already noted, this badge comes from the same team that created the SHA2017 hacker camp’s offering, and shares that badge’s display, ESP32 processor, battery, and firmware. The evolution of that firmware into the badge.team platform is an exciting development in its own right, but in the context of this badge it lends a very familiar feel to the interface for those attendees who were also at the 2017 event.

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Would You Like To Play A Game? WOPR Summit Is This Weekend

February 25, 2019 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

During the summer months it might be known as “America’s Playground”, but around this time of year, Atlantic City is generally the destination of choice for bus loads of seniors looking to burn up some of that fixed income. Of course, that was before the WOPR Summit came to town. From March 1st to the 3rd, it promises to transform Bally’s Hotel and Casino on the famous Atlantic City Boardwalk into a high-tech oasis in a sea of oxygen tanks and walkers. There might not be any fun in the sun to be had at this time of year, but a full schedule of talks and workshops covering everything from penetration testing to ham radio is more our speed anyway.

There’s still a couple days to register for WOPR online at a discount, but naturally they’ll be happy to take your money at the door if you miss the cutoff. As of this writing, there’s even still rooms left at Bally’s for the special WOPR rate, which you’ll probably want to take advantage of as the schedule has events running until well past our normal bedtime.

WOPR looks like it will be a nice mix between hardware and software, with a generous sprinkling of InfoSec. Presentations such as “Strategies for your projects: Concept to Prototype” and “Being Q. — Designing Hacking Gadgets” sound like classic Hackaday fare. But even if you aren’t normally into the security scene, talks such as “Ham Hacks: Breaking into Software Defined Radio” and “An Introduction to IoT Penetration Testing” seem like they’ll be an excellent way to cross the divide. In between the talks, they promise to have a hackerspace up and running for you to check out, complete with soldering classes and contests.

It’s not often that you get to witness the birth of a new hacking conference, especially one on the East Coast, so Hackaday will be shaking off the last bits of our long winters nap as I catch the next bus out of the Senior Center that’s headed towards the Boardwalk. Track me down and you might even be able to take some of our Jolly Wrencher stickers home along with your slot machine winnings. But even if you can’t make it to America’s rather chilled and blustery playground this weekend, I’ll be sure to report on all the highlights so you can live vicariously through the comforting flicker of your favorite screen.

Supercon: Ruth Grace Wong And Firmware From The Firehose

February 22, 2019 by Elliot Williams 13 Comments

Firmware and software are both just code, right? How different could the code that runs Internet-scale distributed web stuff be from the code that runs a tiny microcontroller brain inside a personal hydroponics device? Night and day!

Ruth Grace Wong works in the former world, but moonlights as a manufacturing engineer with some friends. Their product had pre-existing firmware that contained (at least) one bug, and Ruth’s job was to find it. The code in question was written by the Chinese PCB engineer, who knew the electronics intimately but who had no software background, providing Ruth an opportunity to jump head-first into the rawest of raw embedded programming. Spoiler alert: she found the bug and learned a lot about firmware along the way. This talk follows her along the adventure.

“The code is very well documented, in Chinese” but the variable names are insanely non-descriptive. Similarly, while the PCB engineer knows full well what a 24C02 is, if you’re a software geek that might as well be Chinese. As you’d expect, web searches came to the rescue on both fronts.

The bug ended up hiding in a logical flaw in the PWM-setting code inside an interrupt service routine, and it kept the fan from ever coming full on. Once found, it was easily fixed. But getting to the point where you understand the codebase deeply enough to know where to look is four-fifths of the battle. Heck, setting up the toolchain alone can take a day or two.

If you’re a fellow software type, Ruth’s talk (embedded below) will give you a quick glimpse into the outer few layers of the onion that is embedded firmware development, from a familiar viewpoint. Give her quick and value-packed talk a watch! Grizzled hardware veterans will nod along, and maybe even gain a little insight into how our code looks to “them”.

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Badge.Team: Badges Get A Platform

February 20, 2019 by Jenny List 21 Comments

Electronic conference badges are now an accepted part of the lifeblood of our community, with even the simplest of events now sporting a fully functional computer as an eye-catching PCB on a lanyard. Event schedules and applications are shipped on them, and the more sophisticated ones have app libraries and support development communities of their own.

The trouble is that so often those badges fail to live up to their promise, and one reason behind that stems from the enormity of the task facing a badge team when it comes to firmware for a modern badge. There is some fascinating news from the Netherlands that might reduce some of those firmware woes though, badge.team is a freshly-launched project that provides a ready-made badge firmware with the promise of both stability and long-term support. If you’re making a badge, or even a one-off device using the ESP32, this is a project worth checking out.

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Electron Microscopes Are Awesome: Everything You Didn’t Know You Wanted To Know

February 18, 2019 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

Electron microscopes were once the turf of research laboratories that could foot the hefty bill of procuring and maintaining such equipment. But old models have been finding their way into the hands of eager individuals who are giving us an inside look at the rare equipment. Before you start scouring Craigslist, go on a crash course of what you need to know with Adam McComb’s Hacker’s Guide to Electron Microscopy. He presented the talk at the 2018 Hackaday Superconference and the recording was just published, you’ll find it below.

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